patience sorely many a time, for I was a wee bit wild and boisterous in those days, and though I loved and indeed worshipped him as the greatest man then bearing us company on earth, our Socialist League equalitarian ideas sometimes led us into foolish affectations of almost irreverence. But his generous heart forgave us all.'
Glasier had been for some years busied with Socialist lecturing when my father became acquainted with the Scottish circle in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the meeting with this 'half-mythical being,' who was pictured by the ingenuous young men as leading an Arcadian life in the world of poetry and art down South, was to them an exciting event. When the hero comes out of the clouds and stands before his admirers as a man and a good comrade, there is danger of disappointment, of a sense of disillusion. But in this case there was no shadow: indeed, the light of reality shone more warmly and happily, and Glasier writes with a sort of epic directness of the first meeting with the poet, and at once gives the keynote of the story he tells us: 'I felt as one enriched with a great possession.'
It is worth while attempting to get the full significance of such words, uttered by one who had spent his life as a young man in the grey atmosphere of Scottish manufacturing centres, dedicating every possible moment to the cause he had at heart: it meant the release of pent-up thoughts, the splendid proclaiming—by a master-voice—of one's own inarticulate ideals; it was indeed the blossoming of the wilderness.
The chapter on Glasgow in the Dawn is, to my mind, of the greatest interest, approaching the subject from the standpoint of a man in the centre of the Labour movement, with outlook and values professedly not those of the student. We get a series of intimate pictures of the Socialist doings of those days, as they might impress Bruce's friends who were either themselves of the working-class, or had cast in their lot with that of Labour. From first to last, indeed, the volume has this special weight: it is the story of that
